They fired their rifles until the insurgent slumped to the ground and blew himself up with a grenade.

Afterward, Gonzalez felt proud of how the Marines responded. “They weren’t scared or nothing. No one was hiding behind someone … saying I’m not going to make it or anything like that,” he recalled. What got them through was “training, and their determination that night.”

It drew them together. “We definitely got tighter after that. We still talk about it, joke about it, saying ‘What’s up, war hero?’” or pretend to be deaf from an incoming insurgent round.

That camaraderie is what he loves about being a Marine, like the spirit that united Americans when the homeland was attacked.